May 2006, Week 1 --Bidding on Ebay

Have your
ever had the eBay experience of bidding on something you wanted and it's
"going, going ... gone," without you? Mysterious, to say the least.

You thought you had put in the high bid, but
someone else bid higher at the last minute. This happened to us so often
we stopped bidding on anything.

There are several programs that will let you
ace out the last-minute bidder; unfortunately, the last-minute bidders
have them too. But we recently got one that's pretty easy to use, and it
allowed us to navigate the confusing eBay site, as well.

It's called Final Bid from Vcom, a company
well-known for utility programs. First, it allows you complex searches
to find the items you want. If there are several people offering the
same item -- a Beatles CD, for example -- you can make a clustered bid
to all of them. The program will cancel the bids to other vendors as
soon as one is accepted. That winning bid would also be at your lowest
price.

The program can be set to make bids whether
you are present or not. At the last minute before an auction closes, for
example, the program can log onto eBay without you and make incremental
bids above the most recent bid, up to whatever limit you have set.

The program also lets you save pictures and
descriptions of items that interest you so you can ponder them at
leisure. Some people resell what they buy and keep the same
descriptions. Final Bid is $40 from
www.v-com.com, as a download or on disk.

The Advanced Toolbar we just tried out is free and links to just about
every site under the sun with the click of a mouse. It also comes with
an automatic form filler, adult content blocker, spyware remover, pop-up
blocker, browser tracks eraser, calendar and the kitchen sink.

The Advanced Toolbar works only with Windows Internet Explorer. When you
load it, a bar of choices appears near the top of the Explorer home
page. You can add frequently used tabs to that toolbar -- like "mail,"
and get your mail just by clicking on that. Others we put up were
"music," "clear browser tracks," "health," "games " and "e-cards," and
we're adding others as we think of them.

How does a company make money on a free service? As someone always says
in those old war movies, "Vee haff our vays." Actually, quite a few
successful Web businesses have started out by providing services that
were completely free, but were later converted to monthly charges. You
can get the Advanced Toolbar at www.advancedtoolbar.com.

Hard
Driven

Seagate has some new high-capacity portable
disk drives ranging from 40 gigabytes to 160 gigabytes; prices go from
$119 to around $300 as you go up in capacity. The new drives can work
with Windows or Mac computers and require no external transformers,
drawing their power directly from a computer's USB ports.

On the Web site
www.seagate.com, the drive is identified simply as "USB 2.0 Portable
Hard Drive." We got one, and it feels and looks like it could withstand
anything short of a shotgun blast.

The data transfer rate is a very fast 480
megabits per second. That translates to more than a million words a
second. That speed is aided by an 8-megabyte cache in the larger drives,
which means the chit-chat of queries back and forth between the computer
and the drive can be kept out of the traffic while the business at hand
keeps going.

The drive is the size of a paperback book
and has well-ventilated sides to keep things cool. Very nice; in fact,
the nicest portables to date.

Some commentary here: Large-capacity drives
carry risk because of their capacity. When you have 160 gigabytes of
data and that drive fails for some reason, you have a real problem. If
that information is mostly text, like records of transactions,
contracts, legal briefs, etc., it would be about 30 billion words --
about 150,000 books of roughly 500 pages each.

Fotolog is a Web site:
www.fotolog.com. Every day, people from 200 countries post around
300,000 photos to the site plus 3 million words of commentary. At last
count, there were roughly 3 million members, and they have posted 94
million photos. About a thousand of them are in this book, also with
commentary.

Fotolog was founded in 2002 by Adam Seifer,
who used it as a photo blog to display pictures of each of his meals
before he ate them. (He likes eggs a lot.) He still does this, while
others indulge their fascination with utility poles, wet streets,
doorways, etc. This collection is more interesting than that, however: A
young woman dresses as a child, for example, and is photographed in
scenes from "Alice in Wonderland"; another rides a bicycle costumed as a
dog or a rabbit.

A free membership in Fotolog allows the
member to post one photo a day; for $5 a month the member can post six
photos a day. Digital photography has done more than create another way
to take pictures; it has created a kind of communication and community
that would have been nearly impossible with film.